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Mental health disorders are among the leading worldwide causes of disease and long-term disability. This issue has a long and painful history of gradual de-stigmatization of patients, coinciding with humanization of therapeutic approaches. What are the current trends in Russia regarding this issue and in what ways is it similar to and different from Western countries? IQ.HSE provides an overview of this problem based on research carried out by Svetlana Kolpakova.

On September 5, Laurie Manchester, Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University, presented her paper on voluntary repatriation of Russians from China to the Soviet Union between 1935 and 1960. The presentation was part of the research seminar, ‘Boundaries of History’, held regularly by the Department of History at HSE University in St. Petersburg. HSE News Service spoke with Laurie Manchester about her research interests, collaborating with HSE faculty members, and the latest workshop.

Dr. Sabyasachi Tripathi, from Kolkata, India, is a new research fellow at HSE University. He will be working at the Laboratory for Science and Technology Studies of the Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge.

Th is monograph “Th e Greek Islands of Catherine the Great: Russia’s Imperial Realities in the Mediterranean” by Professor Elena B. Smilianskaia of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, investigates the history of the Russian-Ottoman War of 1768–1774. It is based on a wide array of historical sources, among them archival records from the collections of the Russian State Naval Archive (RGAVMF), the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA), the Russian State Military History Archive (RGVIA), and others. Th e text also contains visual materials gathered in Greece. Th e book proceeds in two parts: the fi rst discusses the development of political authority over the Greek islands in the Aegean Sea (otherwise referred to as the Archipelago islands), which came under Russian control in the 1770s, while the second examines the creation of a Russian naval base on Paros. Th e appendices include a journal kept by a participant of the expedition, K.L. von Tölle (an archival manuscript translated from the German and annotated by Anna Friesen) and M.G. Kokovtsev’s 1786 essay, “A Description of the Archipelago.” During the years from 1770 to 1775 Russian naval commanders Aleksei Orlov, Grigorii Spiridov, and Andrei Elmanov pursued Catherine’s goals in the Mediterranean, which involved constructing a Russian naval base and liberating Orthodox Christians from Ottoman rule. Th is was a unique moment in Russian history, as it brought the fi rst overseas territories — thirty islands in the Aegean Sea — under Russian control, and it provided an opportunity for future Russian military and political presence in the Mediterranean. Beginning in 1771, when the fi rst archipelago islands took an oath to Empress Catherine II, the leaders of the Archipelago expedition endeavored to reform government and taxation, set up a Senate and chancellery, create an autocephalous Orthodox Church, and form an independent Synod. In accordance with the Empress’s wishes, they established a special school for Greek children on the island of Naxos. However, according to the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774) between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the Russian fl eet had to leave the Eastern Mediterranean and Archipelago islands. Th e Russians also abandoned a partiallybuilt military base on Paros. Th ese departures stranded the islands’ inhabitants, who for fi ve years had considered themselves ‘subjects’ of the Russian empress. Th e Russian Empire left them only with the possibility of migrating to southern Russia. Catherine the Great’s Mediterranean policy provoked a discussion about the extreme nature of her colonial ambitions in that region. Th is book debunks the theories that ‘the Greek idea’ constituted merely a political game for Russia and that Russian activity on the Aegean islands was only military in nature. At the same time it demonstrates that Catherine II’s colonial ambitions were in fact rather limited compared to those of other contemporaneous powers. Not being able to support a colony in the eastern Mediterranean, Russia dreamed only about establishing a small Russian military base that would be surrounded by liberated self-governed Greek territories under Catherine II’s protection. When the liberated Greek islands became an obstacle to enlarging Russian territory on the Black sea coast, however, they were exchanged primarily for Crimea.

Over the last quarter of the century relations between Russia and Poland are balancing between trying to understand the burden of mutual guilt and a desire to construct non-emotional pragmatic relations. Sources of tension vary. In particular, it is the desire of Poland to position itself as a valued player in NATO and the EU and the role distance between the two countries in IR system, which does not allow Russia to maintain an equal political dialogue with Poland. In fact, Poland is not afraid of a direct threat from Russia, but the worst scenario is the one in which Russia without changing the content of its imperial policy can be accepted as a full partner in the international community. The evolution of Russian statehood and national specifics of democracy is largely determined the assessment of the prospects of Russian politics in Poland. The mistake of Polish diplomacy last years was that it took no direct efforts to improve relations with Russia, but only tried to impose the dialogue on Russian authorities. Diplomatic methods were designed to hurt Russian interests and to create a topic for discussion. In response, after 2006 Russia chose the tactic of ignoring Poland. But, ignoring Polish authorities, Russian politicians acted similarly with other political forces. In Poland among influential political forces, there was and there is still no loyalty to Russia. For Russian interests it is no matter who are or will be in power in Poland. However as a rule, it is an important factor that foreign policy decisions are de facto within the competences of the President and the government, as well as experiencing a significant influence of the parliamentary forces. Recent trends show no tangible innovations in bilateral programme. But innovations appear in multilateral and conflict enough issues, such as deployment of US missile defense system in Poland or Polish supervision of "Eastern Partnership" programme. The main problem is low self-sufficiency of bilateral relations and excessive influence of third countries. Any efforts to normalize bilateral relations will be meaningless until the weight of bilateral relations really increases to each of the party.

Back in 2008 when the conflict between Russia and Georgia broke out, International Centre on Conflict and Negotiation initiated the most long-standing of dialogue efforts between Russian and Georgian high-profile political experts, named later, as per the site of the meetings, the Istanbul Process. GPPAC, as a global network of civil society organisations, working across conflicts on an international level, and perceived as being able to play an impartial role in facilitating the dialogue processes, supported and partnered this important initiative, offering a framework that provided the needed, politically neutral, environment for the Russian and Georgian sides to engage with each other.

The Mediterranean policy of Catherine the Great gave rise to a discussion about how extreme her colonial ambitions in the Mediterranean were. This article argues against the theories that ‘the Greek idea’ was only a political game for Russia, that Russian activity on the Aegean islands was only military, and that the success of the Archipelago expedition (1769-1775) was primarily due to foreign support. It shows that Catherine II’s colonial ambitions were in fact rather limited compared to other powers of the period. Russia could not imagine having a colony in the eastern Mediterranean, but planned only a small military base surrounded by liberated self-governed Greek territories under the Catherine II’s protection. When the liberated Greek islands became an obstacle to enlarging Russian territory on the Black sea coast, however, they were exchanged, primarily for Crimea.

The article deals with the processes of building the information society and security in the CIS in accordance with modern conditions. The main objective is to review existing mechanisms for the formation of a common information space in the Eurasian region, regarded as one of the essential aspects of international integration. The theoretical significance of the work is to determine the main controls of the regional information infrastructure, improved by the development of communication features in a rapid process.The practical component consists in determining the future policies of the region under consideration in building the information society. The study authors used historical-descriptive approach and factual analysis of events having to do with drawing the contours of today's global information society in the regional refraction.

The main result is the fact that the development of information and communication technologies, and network resources leads to increased threats of destabilization of the socio-political situation in view of the emergence of multiple centers that generate the ideological and psychological background. Keeping focused information policy can not be conceived without the collective participation of States in the first place, members of the group leaders of integration - Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Currently, only produced a comprehensive approach to security in the information field in the Eurasian region, but the events in the world, largely thanks to modern technology, make the search for an exit strategy with a much higher speed.
The article contributes to the science of international relations, engaging in interdisciplinary thinking that is associated with a transition period in the development of society. A study of current conditions in their relation to the current socio-political patterns of the authors leads to conclusions about the need for cooperation with the network centers of power in the modern information environment, the formation of alternative models of networking, especially in innovation and scientific and technical areas of information policy, and expanding the integration of the field in this region on the information content.

The emergence of the Tea Party movement in recent years has shown that under the surface of mainstream political life in the USA there exists a different layer of ideas, which cannot be satisfactorily described in terms of the Republican/Democrat dichotomy. These ideas have their origins in the foundation of the American Republic, which owes a lot to ancient and mediaeval political theory. In the twentieth century there was a revival of these ideas in the form of the so-called “paleoconservative” movements which rediscovered their ancient and mediaeval heritage. This paper focuses on one of them, the Southern Agrarian movement, as exemplary of this radical intellectual project.

Gerrymandering – the artful and partisan manipulation of electoral districts – is a well known pathology of electoral systems, especially majoritarian ones. In this paper, we try to give theoretical and experimental answers to the following questions: 1) How much biased can the assignment of seats be under the effect of gerrymandering? 2) How effective is compactness as a remedy against gerrymandering? Accordingly, the paper is divided into two parts. In the first one, a highly stylized combinatorial model of gerrymandering is studied; in the second one, a more realistic multiobjective graph-partitioning model is adopted and local search techniques are exploited in order to find satisfactory district designs. In a nutshell, our results for the theoretical model mean that gerrymandering is as bad as one can think of and that compactness is as good as one can think of. These conclusions are confirmed to a large extent by the experimental results obtained with the latter model on some medium-large real-life test problems.

The article is devoted to the study of the authoritarianism prevalent in the mass consciousness of Russians. The article describes a new approach to the consideration of the authoritarian syndrome as the effects of the cultural trauma as a result of political and socio-cultural transformation of society. The article shows the dynamics of the symptoms of the authoritarianism, which appear in the mass consciousness of Russians from 1993 to 2011. This paper proposes a package of measures aimed at reducing the level of the authoritarianism in Russian society.

This paper studies the background and guidelines of discussions about the concept of sovereignty
and its limits. The paper begins with a short historical analysis of the processes that took place in
Soviet Russia that led to the “parade of sovereignties” in the early 1990s. Afterwards, the author
sketches the different approaches and doctrines upheld by the Constitutional Court of Russia in
several decisions concerning sovereignty problems. The paper focuses on the vertical dimension
of sovereignty, i.e. on different conceptions adopted by the federal and regional powers in postSoviet Russia regarding the legal status of the member-republics of the Russian Federation. The
development of the doctrine of the Constitutional Court of Russia in this matter is quite
illustrative as to the legal arguments used to protect the integrity of the Russian Federation
against the diverse disintegrative strategies pursued by the regions.

This work looks at a model of spatial election competition with two candidates who can spend effort in order to increase their popularity through advertisement. It is shown that under certain condition the political programs of the candidates will be different. The work derives the comparative statics of equilibrium policy platform and campaign spending with respect the distribution of voter policy preferences and the proportionality of the electoral system. In particular, it is whown that the equilibrium does not exist if the policy preferences are distributed over too narrow an interval.

This is the collection of articles devoted to the research of the Armenian Republic in different aspects. These reports were presented on the conference “The Republic of Armenia 2010: Previous Experiences – Future Prospects” in 2010 in Tehran.

The article examines "regulatory requirements" as a subject of state control over business in Russia. The author deliberately does not use the term "the rule of law". The article states that a set of requirements for business is wider than the legislative regulation.

First, the article analyzes the regulatory nature of the requirements, especially in the technical field. The requirements are considered in relation to the rule of law. The article explores approaches to the definition of regulatory requirements in Russian legal science. The author analyzes legislation definitions for a set of requirements for business.
The author concludes that regulatory requirements are not always identical to the rule of law. Regulatory requirements are a set of obligatory requirements for entrepreneurs’ economic activity. Validation failure leads to negative consequences.

Second, the article analyzes the problems of the regulatory requirements in practice. Lack of information about the requirements, their irrelevance and inconsistency are problems of the regulatory requirements in Russia.

Many requirements regulating economic activity are not compatible with the current development level of science and technology. The problems are analyzed on the basis of the Russian judicial practice and annual monitoring reports by Higher School of Economics.

Finally, the author provides an approach to the possible solution of the regulatory requirements’ problem. The author proposes to create a nationwide Internet portal about regulatory requirements. The portal should contain full information about all regulatory requirements. The author recommends extending moratorium on the use of the requirements adopted by the bodies and organizations of the former USSR government.

Nechiporuk D., Belokurova E., Nozhenko M. Working Papers of Centre for German and European Studies. Centre for German and European Studies, 2011. No. 10.

The paper describes some results of the international project “Improving Societal Conditions for the Baltic Sea Protection” (PROBALT) conducted by the international team of scholars from Finland, Germany and Russia in 2009-2011 in the framework of the broader BONUS+ programme. The project rested on the assumptions that the relatively unsuccessful actions aimed to protect the Baltic Sea cannot be explained only by lack of scientific knowledge of the existing ecological problems. Here, an important role is played by the sociocultural factors that influence the course of environmental policy at different levels: supranational, national and subnational. Special attention was drawn to the problem of eutrophication or enrichment of water bodies with the so called biogenic substances (phosphates, nitrogen, etc), which leads to massive algae bloom and lack of oxygen for marine organisms. Therefore, the principal aim of the research was to define the societal conditions for the protection of the Baltic Sea in the cases of the EU and some coastal countries like Finland, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Russia. But in this Working Paper only the results of the research on the Russian case are presented.